Liz Weston: Times when money isn't real

Money is money, whether it's cash in our hands, plastic cards at checkout counters or encrypted bits of data coursing between computers on the internet.

The "Save More Tomorrow" program, created by economists Richard H. Thaler and Shlomo Benartzi, has people commit to increasing their retirement contributions starting one year in the future.

In the economists' initial study , workers who agreed to save future dollars nearly quadrupled their savings rate in four years.

Time-share newbies can be gobsmacked by rising annual fees, the hassles of trading their units and the difficulty of shedding unwanted time-shares.

High-deductible insurance plans are supposed to make us more careful about our health care spending, because we have to shell out more of our own money before insurance takes over.

All kinds of brain fails are to blame for this: status quo bias (we want to keep the money in our pockets), loss aversion (it can be painful to reduce our lifestyle, or spend less on stuff we want, because of health care costs) and hyperbolic discounting — the benefit of keeping our cash seems much greater than the possible future benefit of good health.

If you opt for a high-deductible plan, make sure that you keep enough cash earmarked in savings to cover that deductible and that you use it to stay current on your health care.